If you're looking for marketing information and ideas, Google's newest service just might have you covered. At their Think With Google website, the search engine unveiled a new section called Think Insights – an area so chock full of useful marketing-related data you could spend many hours reading.
Search Engine Land justifiably refers to Think Insights as “data porn.” Google's blog entry on the just-out-of-beta section talks about some very detailed questions that Think Insights tools could be used to answer, such as “Based on search history, consumer demand for pretzels peaks in what month of the year?” and “What percent of the daily queries on Google.com have never been seen before?”
Think Insights offers a ton of tools, studies, and more that marketers can use for gleaning helpful information from the search engine itself. Google recommends using the Real-Time Insights Finder if you're pressed for time and want a quick taste of what's available. The tool looks like a circle cut into five sections that let you discover what people are watching, looking for, and saying, as well as how they're searching and where they're clicking. Hovering over a section gives you more options; click on one of those and you might find your way to another tool. That's how I found out that the most popular video on YouTube among US females aged 13-17 is Asher Monroe's “Like I Do” music video, but among males in the same country and age group it's the “Official Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3” game trailer.
Think Insights itself offers five sections: Latest Insights, Research Library, Planning Tools, Facts & Stats, and Thinking Ahead. Many of the sections include a lead piece with links to related studies, articles, and videos. The Planning Tools section includes a dozen or more tools that marketers can use for scaring up trends and discovering important search-related demographic data. Facts & Stats offers a wide selection of statistics you can use to bolster a presentation – such as the fact that every minute, more than 500 tweets contain YouTube links.
Think Insight's Research Library section, as you'd expect, is chock full of featured studies containing “custom research from Google and select partners, case studies, insights, interviews with thought leaders, soundbites from our many industry events, and more,” according to Google. The search engine breaks it down in several ways. In the center of the page, you can check out featured case studies, featured videos, and featured infographics. On the left side, you'll find the major topics covered include Industry, Media Platform, Audience, and Marketing Objective; all of these are broken into smaller sub-categories. For instance, under Audience, you'll find links for Affluents, African Americans, Boomers, Moms, and more. Clicking on one of these reveals information related to that topic; for example, a click on Affluents revealed two research studies, while a click on Boomers unveiled five studies and one video, all covering different topics (such as beauty, health care, boomer attitudes toward media, and so on).
You can find a lot more on Think Insight just from playing with it and clicking around. It features the kind of clean, uncluttered interface you'd expect from any Google product. And it just might change your approach to marketing research.
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